Alberto Giacometti

It would be hard to find more appropriate depictions of human beings, now, than those of the great Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti.

Indeed, at the pinnacle of our human accomplishment and progress, we became thinner and thinner, metaphorically speaking, elongated perhaps by the very "success" of our “unprecedented” triumphalism.

What plagued Giacometti…?

Could it be that what plagued him plagued also Samuel Beckett…?

It is well known Beckett's stubborn pessimism: “I can’t go on. I will go on.”

Indeed, it seems Alberto's filiform sculptures whisper the very same thing: "I can’t go on. I will go on."

Brave this tenacity at the edge of the abyss. But maybe exactly there true courage is tested and needed.

Giacometti depicted a human being thinned to the point of almost disappearance. Yet, how condensed, how dense this filiform figures are! Their very fragility is their power.

And we receive encouragements to continue (to live) exactly from these linear abstractions of what a human being is. Yet, these abstractions tremble, you can feel their emotions, you can feel that that linearity does not preclude them of being full of passion, full of emotion.

Yes, these sculptures are the very opposite of artistic triumphalism. And just as, correctly, Joseph Brodsky said that a triumphal church is impossible to conceive, maybe we could say that a serious, sensitive, “knowing” art could also be impossible to be “triumphal.”

But what else is art, if not the metamorphosis of vulnerability into power…? But its power is the power of the blade of grass, of Van Gogh, and, yes, of Giacometti.

We are ALL his sculptures. We are ALL vertical (only for a while) dust. We are ALL mere lines, of a certain length… measurable.

But we are also repositories of immeasurableness, that immeasurableness born from desire, longing, aspiration, dream.

What sustains us, in our darkest hours…?

It is hard to tell. But one thing is for sure: we are perishable. All of us.

Thus, all of us are Giacometti’s sculptures.

Let’s imagine A HOUSE FOR ALBERTO GIACOMETTI.

A HOUSE FOR A FILIFORM HUMAN BEING.

A HOUSE FOR THE TENACITY, AND POWER, OF A THIN, TREMBLING BLADE OF GRASS.

A HOUSE FOR A GIACOMETTI LINE.

THE HOUSE OF DISAPPEARANCE, REBORN.

Please send us ANY work, ANY size, ANY format. The deadline to submit your work will be the 10th of October, 2016, his 115th birthday. He died 50 years ago, on January 10th. Please write to info@icarch.us to register by October 1st, 2016. You will receive a registration number with which to anonymously to identify your work. The registration is free. We will publish all the works received and we will organize an exhibition with the best projects.